In the cheap web design group of this prolonged series of articles (I'll give myself enough credit to not call it rambling until I get into the custom/unique dichotomy) I asserted that there was indeed a difference between "affordable website design" and "cheap web design". Enough of one, in fact, to warrant writing a separate set of articles for each. In short, the primary difference I described was that the latter option represented the creation of a site that was quantitatively low in cost. An affordable website design, on the other hand, can range from several hundred to several thousand dollars without losing its title - provided, naturally, that you are actually getting a site with a high value for the price you pay. To quote one of my father's articles, affordable website design "may really be getting what you want at a fair and reasonable price."
To that end, you have to know what it is that you want. This is important for several reasons, not the least of which being that it helps you avoid paying too much if you wind up choosing a "value meal" website design. You know the type, the so-called "packages" that all seem to provide the same services, except you get more pages with each increment. Some of them go even further, offering web hosting packages along with their website designs, which all sounds real nice until you realize that they're probably just buying reseller hosting from the bigger, better hosting companies and providing you with inferior services at a higher price. In fact, perhaps one of the most useful things you can get for an affordable website design is a good, inexpensive hosting company. At least that way you aren't wasting extra money on second-hand hosting.
Ideally, though, you'll have not only a good host, but also a web designer who charges by the actual value of the site. Determining this value is a topic best saved for the "what you get" article, but there is something that you can do in these cases to help keep the costs down. Yep, knowing exactly what it is that you want. Many people go into website design without really having any idea what they want their site to accomplish, even what they want it to look like. That's forgivable; after all, they're hiring these professionals to build the site, right? Professionals who presumably have far more experience in creating websites properly. No doubt, if you say, "I have a restaurant and it needs a website," your designer will be able to immediately draw upon its vast understanding and experience to create an attractive, functional site for your restaurant.
And you will be getting an incredibly unaffordable website. Why? Because you aren't taking advantage of your knowledge of your business. It's no secret that I am staunchly opposed to templates, but really, that's just what you're getting in the above scenario. Templates, let's be clear, aren't bad because they're unattractive or poorly-functional sites. Admittedly, some of the WYSIWYG editors leave a bit to be desired, but that's not a problem once you actually managed (possibly with much banging on the keyboard and hopefully with significantly less inserting your fist into your computer screen) to get your site on-line. Templates are bad because they don't take your business into account. A template, in short, is the product of an experienced website designer with absolutely no input from the business. Given that you can get templates for cheap or even free, paying a designer for what amounts to the same thing is always the worse deal.
You don't want a website for a restaurant; you want a website for your restaurant. Complete with graphics and functions designed to appeal to and improve the experience of your clientele. Only you know if the most useful way to present your menu on the web is in a beautiful graphical format that appears so real that the visitor almost smells the food, or as a system of drop-down menus and JavaScript functions that lets the visitor craft the perfect order before ever setting foot into your building. Those are the sorts of things that a skilled website design team can accomplish - and hundreds more beside them - but they're not likely to use them if all you tell them you want is a restaurant site. You'll get a nice-looking website, probably with some reds and yellows because those colors are supposed to stimulate hunger, with a section for your menu and maybe an area for images of your dishes. Probably a picture of the building on the front page. About us and contact somewhere. Perhaps a site map. Starting to sound formulaic? Almost template-like? Then I suppose I've made my point and we're ready to move on.
A template looks and feels professional, but they remain formulas. They draw upon a web designer's overall learning without bringing its experience to bear on your business. Paying a designer and failing to capitalize on this most advantageous aspect of doing so is like paying for a template, which is not affordable no matter how cheap the design may be. If you want an affordable website design, you have to go to your designer prepared to explain all the cool things you want your website to be able to do. Only with that preparation are you certain to be able to both get a good price and obtain exactly what you need.
The true measure of a website's affordability is its value, not its cost. You can get an affordable website design for a thousand dollars, and if it includes powerful programming, custom graphic design, even some e-commerce and SEO, it is quite a value indeed. On the other hand, its title immediately changes to expensive if you only receive a few web pages, a stylesheet, and a site map. So how do you know how affordable a website really is? How do you decide what you should get to ensure that you are getting what you paid for?
Ever notice how a lot of web designers sell their services in packages? Take a look at the packages they offer. Are they looking suspiciously similar? Are you noticing that the main difference in the package is number of pages or improved hosting services (such as email accounts, bandwidth, and storage)? I've used packages like this as examples in a few of my articles; I like to call them "value meal" web design, not out of any actual value, but because they remind me a lot of a fast food restaurant where you buy for the burger but pay by the french fry.
Now of course, you aren't going to want to limit yourself to only a few pages or a few hundred megs of monthly bandwidth. You have ambitions! And that's how you wind up losing money. It looks impressive, and it's meant to, because you see how it already costs a hundred dollars or so just for a basic ten page site or a hosting plan with 10 MB storage and 100 MB bandwidth and 10 email accounts, so when you see that the $1,000 plan has a thousand pages, a gig of storage, 10 gigs of bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts, well, that's a pretty good value. Ten times the price for a hundred times the stuff.
It's a clever tactic, and it's no doubt a tactic intended to catch people who don't have experience with web design and web hosting and don't realize the actual value of the services being offered. First off, what are the chances that you're actually going to use a thousand web pages? Just so you know, that probably doesn't mean they write a thousand quality pages for your website. It means you can give them a thousand pages of text and they'll format it and link it up and lay it out. Not individually, of course. They're web designers; they have stylesheets and php inclusions and databases to do all that for them. But chances are, by the time you actually have a thousand pages worth of information, you're looking for a database-driven site, which dynamically creates individual pages, so the actual page count is irrelevant.
But what about that storage and bandwidth? A gig of storage and ten gigs of bandwidth may very well be required; you can manage with less, but if you plan for your site to grow, that's a pretty solid amount. The thing is, in the grand scheme of things, that's dinky. Bigger web hosts often offer hosting packages for under ten dollars per month that offer - ready for this? - thousands of gigs of storage and bandwidth. Not to mention unlimited emails, a few add-on domains, and a variety of extras. These small web design companies are offering you something called reseller hosting, where they buy a package from a big host and sell the hosting to their clients. The packages they provide are smaller than those the main hosting company, but will probably cost more, because they need to make a profit. It's a typical middle-man addition that saves you nothing, unless you really want to only pay one company.
So what should you be looking for in an affordable website design? You should be looking for a flexible pricing system that allows you to put what you want into your site, be it graphics or programming or e-commerce. You should look for a designer who has the experience to figure out how to build your site the way you want it and the creativity to show some style while doing so. You should look for companies that don't charge by the page, and you should look for a full-service, dedicated web host to house your final site (if your designer can recommend a good one, all the better!) In short, you shouldn't purchase a website that charges based on a systemic package that you probably won't use to its fullest. You should buy the site with a price based on what you'll use and what you get.
Dustin Schwerman has sinced written about articles on various topics from Web Development, Web Development and Boating. Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer information on subjects ranging from. Dustin Schwerman's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.